Are there ways to keep this at a minimum or to limit it to only when necessary?

This is from powertop.

I suppose with Firefox there is not much that can be done unless history/cookies/cache/etc are set to never be saved.

The program 'firefox-bin' is writing to file 'webappsstore.sqlite' on /dev/sda6.
This prevents the disk from going to powersave mode.

What is this? I don't have a Web App Store addon of any kind.

The program 'firefox-bin' is writing to file 'cookies.sqlite' on /dev/sda6.
This prevents the disk from going to powersave mode.
The program firefox-bin' is writing to file 'places.sqlite-wal' on /dev/sda6.
This prevents the disk from going to powersave mode.

What about the other apps?

The program 'flush-8:0' is writing to file '_CACHE_003_' on /dev/sda6.
This prevents the disk from going to powersave mode.
The program 'dconf-service' is writing to file 'user.62VC1V' on /dev/sda6.
This prevents the disk from going to powersave mode.
The program 'unity-panel-ser' is writing to file 'user' on /dev/sda6.
This prevents the disk from going to powersave mode.

I think if the app haven't got a option for this you only can remove them on your own I would recommend a logrotate script or did I understand your question wrong? With a logrotate script you could automate this. If I am wrong please correct me.

Thanks. Logrotate, I believe, does not prevent apps from writing logs to disk. It only manages it by compressing and rotating logs after reaching a size or after a given time.
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MarkySep 13 '11 at 22:11

You can remove logs with logrotate also but yes it doesn't prevent from writing logs.
–
Sebastian GrebeSep 14 '11 at 17:25